His jingoism put some of the blokes’ backs up, but I didn’t mind him, and he seemed to have quite taken to me. One evening he came up to me and asked me how I polished my cap badge. He seemed a bit shocked when I said it hadn’t occurred to me to polish it at all. For something to say, I told him I’d seen Oamer going at his with some sort of white paste.
‘That’s toothpaste, Mr Stringer,’ said Harvey, who never would call me Jim. ‘Toothpaste is for teeth. Best thing is to use a dab of vinegar.’
‘You sure, son?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to smell like a pickled onion.’
‘Vinegar,’ he said, winking at me, ‘it’s the army way.’
He’d had this from his family, I believed. He had a number of relations who’d been in the colours before the war, and I’d heard that his father – currently working as a barman in the York Station Hotel – had won the Distinguished Conduct Medal in some long forgotten Empire Campaign.
We spent half of every day training, half of it drilling, and it got so you’d actually think about standing. I’d be out in Hull, waiting for a tram, and I’d be thinking: now I’m standing at ease; now I’m standing easy. The idea was that we would all move as one mechanism, but this never quite came about. We remained individuals, and most of us more railwayman than soldier. I kept cases on those particular individuals I have already mentioned, because we were all from York, and all in the same company. Anyhow these blokes interested me, and some of them I liked.
Oamer was about the best-liked NCO in the battalion, and the only mystery was why he’d not become an officer. I supposed he was seen as an oddity with his pipe, his thoughtful remarks, his rather too comfortable appearance. I recall one night in the dormitory watching him slowly applying foot powder while turning the pages of a difficult-looking book. He wrote a letter to somebody every night, and no man knew who. It did cross my mind that he might be queer.
My particular pal was Bernie Dawson (as I came to know him). His shadowy moustache survived the hatred of two sergeants and one sergeant major. He soon got a name for liking a drop of ale, and I believe he was involved in a bit of a barney in one of the Hull pubs, but I never saw any repeat of the Bootham Hotel sort of carry-on. He went everywhere with scuffed boots and – when we got our uniforms – pocket flaps undone, but he was amusing company.
My other mate was young Alfred Tinsley. Off duty, he and I would go and look at the engines at Hull Paragon station, and he would write down the numbers while telling me all about this footplate god of his – the York South Shed man – whose name, I learnt, was Tom Shaw. I’d never heard of Tom Shaw, and could scarcely credit his existence, since Tinsley only ever spoke to me about him, and the bloke seemed so perfect in all respects. But I was happy to go along with the lad’s railway talk. (The footplate had been my original calling, and late at night in the dormitory, I would imagine myself driving engines for the army in France, and somehow saving the day by putting up some hard running of my own.)
Tinsley had a down on Harvey, who, he complained, was forever boasting of his army connections. Other blokes said the same, but I only ever saw the enthusiasm of the boy scout in Harvey; I found him amusing more than anything, and it counted for something with me that the Chief had liked him.
In February of 1915 I was called in again to see Butterfield, and he was still worrying away at the question of why I would not join the military police. At the end of our interview, he sat back, and said, ‘I consider your decision unwise’, and so there it was in the open: I could not hope for promotion on his watch, having twice defied his wishes. Scholes and Flower had come under the same sort of pressure, and Flower had cracked. His departure for the Military Mounted Police (where he’d be made straight up to corporal) left Scholes glooming about on his own, or sitting on the wall in the dock playing his flute.
When Oliver Butler heard of Flower’s move, he approached me in the reading room, saying, ‘He hasn’t half the brains you have’, which might possibly have been his genuine opinion.
I said. ‘The army police operate at the back and that’s no good for me. I want to have a slap at Fritz.’
‘Where d’you get that talk from?’ he said.
‘William,’ I said, turning the pages of Punch. ‘He might be ten years old, but he’s got some good lines.’
‘Thing is,’ Oliver said, ‘some of the blokes do feel uncomfortable having coppers in the ranks. That’s one reason Butterfield wants rid of you.’
‘Well, it’s hard bloody lines, isn’t it?’
But what he’d said made sense; much the same had occurred to me.
In April 1915, we were told we’d had the great honour of being made a Pioneer Battalion. Pioneers were a kind of sappers: shit shovellers as Oliver Butler bitterly had it; and we did dig a lot of practice trenches, and Andy and Roy Butler could each shift more earth than any three men, of which Oliver Butler was half proud and half ashamed. He himself – being ambitious, for all his sarcastic tone – aimed at the more technical side of pioneering, and had put in for a badge in field telephone operation.
It was known that pioneering might lead to railway construction at the front, but I couldn’t see how it would lead to railway operation, which seemed all the province of the Railway Operating Division, a part of the Royal Engineers.
Anyhow, trenches were the thing mainly required. The Yorkshire Evening Press had stopped talking of ‘steady progress’; it was more a matter of our boys having completely ‘mastered’ whatever was the latest German offensive. The other lot were making the running, in other words. Sometimes the paper would admit that the Germans had attacked ‘in force’, but then we would make ‘a fine recovery’. A small line might be ‘temporarily lost’. How did the bloody Yorkshire Evening Press know the loss was only temporary? Did they have the ability to see the future? You stopped believing it all. You’d look at the stuff not touching on the war – ‘To-Day’s Racing’ or ‘Schoolboy Thieves Arrested’ – and wonder if that was all invented as well.
The fact that my path to promotion was blocked also depressed me, especially since the wife – on my leaves and in her letters – was forever asking when I was going to be made up. I banked on the early departure of Butterfield, for the officers did come and go at a hell of a rate. Second Lieutenant Quinn, for instance, was transferred to another regiment at the start of 1915, so that we had a different company commander during our first three billeting stints (six weeks at a time on the Yorkshire Moors, at Catterick and on Salisbury Plain), but in late summer he came back as Captain Quinn. He remained ever likely to say the word ‘Unfortunately’, and the men played a kind of game. You’d get points for overhearing him coming out with it. I ‘bagged’ one utterance. Quinn was coming off the square with another officer, and I heard him say, ‘Unfortunately we’ve had some rather bad luck.’ Well, I thought, bad luck generally is unfortunate, is it not? I speculated that he might have been talking about the whole situation on the Western Front, which now seemed one giant graveyard for British soldiers.
In the second half of 1915, we all expected our ‘order for the front’ every day, and even the most obviously fretful men – such as Scholes – wanted to get out there just so the waiting would be over. When, in late October, Oamer strolled up to me in the washroom and said, ‘Confidentially, old man, we’re out of here next week’, I thought we were for France at last, but he meant only another billeting stint, this one at Spurn Head.